Criticism this week by soccer player Ahmed al-Merghani of general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi's hard-handed repression of dissent and failure to defeat a mushrooming insurgency in the Sinai peninsula signals mounting discontent in Egypt.

In Turkey, the government has sought to drive a wedge between militant fans and other supporters by arguing that e-ticketing was a way to combat illegal ticket scalping, increase tax revenues and ensure that stadia are safe for families.

The Egyptian judiciary has been more interested in "punishing dissent than establishing justice," Diana el-Tahawy wrote in her Guardian piece. But the judiciary is not alone in its foray against pro-democracy activists.

Pressure on the lower and middle classes is increasing in view of the state's continued failure to deliver at an acceptable level of efficiency as well as the absence of the rule of law, which results from the deeply rooted corruption and the weakening of the state after three years of protests and political turmoil.

An expected decision by Egyptian soccer authorities to ban as terrorist organizations groups of militant soccer fans builds on the definition by Arab autocrats of legitimate, democratic opposition forces as violent threats to their grip on power.

For the United States and many other foreign leaders around the world, from Great Britain to Australia, this sentence was a vivid reminder of Egypt's grotesque reality: that of a country dominated by the military, where the right to a fair trial, a free press, and free expression are blatantly crushed.

When top-down "solutions" from the Egyptian government, military, or state police seem out of reach or otherwise too fickle to rely on, making space for a community to band together and take matters into their own hands through grassroots restorative justice initiatives is a far more reliable.

Watching filmmaker Jehane Noujaim's documentary The Square, about the Egyptian revolution that began in Tahrir Square, one gets the visceral sensation that the iterations of the uprising thus far have played themselves out before you.

I have seen news stories, commentaries and tweets implying that our findings have good news for the Muslim Brotherhood, bad news for the military and surprising news about the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In fact the results are far more complex and nuanced.

I fear that, eventually, a vicious and bloody revolution will bring about an Iranian-style theocracy in Egypt. It is all too often forgotten that the CIA coup of the democratically elected Mosaddegh government in Iran led to the Iranian revolution twenty years later.

Those who want to understand the reasons for the coup in Egypt and for the shocking massacres and human rights violations that followed should study the military, not simply as an important institution in Egypt, but as the controlling institution in Egypt.